Tools

March 25, 2014

In a previous article, I introduced 5 tools for effective behavioral design. These included motivation/ability matrix, triggers, routine/ritual mapping, rewards, and flow/challenges. In this post, I will sketch a behavioral design using these tools.

Using the collaboration workflow as an example, let’s sketch a couple of concepts on "reviewing a design online" workflow. Our manager persona is used to offline meetings, annotating drawings with red pen, and arguing, negotiating, and simply hustling over a design proposal in a closed loop of his team. He is hesitant about the idea of online collaboration and opening the floor to the whole company. How might we introduce a design tool that helps him change his reviewing habits and make them more fruitful and effective?

Figure 1. Manager Persona likes his traditional ways of collaboration

We can start with our persona. What are the motivation and ability issues for him? We might assume that he doesn’t have huge ability issues since reviewing online is a low barrier skill.

Motivation-based design

How can we increase his motivation to adapt to this new behavior? Motivation, according to Dan Pink, depends on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. How might we increase his motivation, touching one of these dimensions? Autonomy is about sense of control, whereas mastery is about sense of achievement, and purpose is about the desire to pursue meaning in a specific situation.

The Motivation/Ability Matrix can be used as a mapping tool to identify possible collaboration motivators. Seeing that his suggestions are heard and implemented by co-workers will be a motivator for the user so he can feel the sense of achievement. If he is appreciated and mentioned in the final design, he is purposefully part of something bigger than his daily workflows. Finally, if he has the ability to edit and delete any of his comments in the collaboration platform, he would feel in control.

Figure 2. Being heard and complimented helps him to feel a sense of purpose and being part of a community

Motivation provides intrinsic dimensions to influence our behavior design, but how about external motivators? We can think of triggers and rewards that might address one of the three dimensions. For instance, use of points, levels, and completion rates might be good rewards and keep the user invested in the product. We might then introduce a collaboration mastery path and a collaboration currency within the product, where the user gets more points and levels as he collaborates more.

We also need to be careful about rewards. The user can easily fall into boredom once he has routinized the rewards. Rewards in the long term should lead to a flow experience, where the user gets challenges that balance ability and motivation.

Trigger Design

How do we situate triggers and challenges in our personas’ daily workflows? This brings us to our routine/ritual mapping tools. Based on user engagement, the designer can organize participatory design sessions with the user, map their daily routines, and dive into any rituals. Using a white board, post-its, and big sketch-pads are useful for mapping activities. You can easily dig into routines as they have lower barriers. They tell us when he works solo, collaborates, takes breaks, etc. Once we know more about these, we can then decide on the type of the triggers, their frequency, and their interval. For example, the designer realizes that our persona uses his commute time to check what others are doing in the company via his smart phone. Such an insight is valuable to consider when and how to nudge our user with triggers such as push notifications or embedded posts within their feed.

Rituals are a bit different; the designer needs to dig deeper with “why” questions, and identify where the user invests his precious time and attention. It helps understand what he really cares and values. We may find that he really values one-to-one interactions in collaboration over online encounters. For him, design reviews are ritualistic: how he uses his red pen, the way people listen, and the way he passes back and forth comments blended with both seriousness and humor. This might be a strong insight for the designer to inform his design. He may come up with the option to have real-time collaboration meetings within the suggested tool and even suggest a virtual red pen be passed between the participants to annotate things over the screen.

As illustrated here, behavior change tools bring more fruitful and deeper insights about users and why they may or may not be adapting to certain behaviors we have designed into products. These tools are complimentary to each other and in certain contexts one tool needs more priority than others.

March 18, 2014

Social media makes it easy for people to post news, discuss ideas, ask questions, and share links. Seen through the eyes of learning content development (LCD) teams, social media is a great way to make connections with the consumers of our learning videos and help topics. We can discover how well our content is working for our audience, discuss ideas to improve it, respond to questions, and boost information discovery by sharing links to new content. We even have the potential of expanding our sphere of influence and reaching a new audience.

So, when we were preparing to launch a new online help site, my LCD team embraced social media…and helped our customers make the shift from “content you find” to “content that finds you.”Here’s what we did…and what we think you can do, too:

1. Choose an outlet

We chose Twitter to acclimate our social-media-savvy customers to our new help platform and learning content offerings. Through our Revit Help Twitter account, we pointed people to the content they needed, answered questions as they came up, and evangelized potentially unknown tips and tricks. With its compact messaging, Twitter worked well for us. Other microblogging outlets, such as Facebook, would also be suitable for communicating in short bursts with a user community.

2. Tune in

We began by tuning into the helpful tips that advanced users of Revit were posting on their blogs and in user forums. When posts revealed shortcomings in our online help content, we improved our help topics, and then pointed people to the new material through our Twitter account. When posts shared fun Revit-related news, ideas, and project results, we pointed our followers to the posts with tweets. When a new version of Revit was released, we began tweeting help topics for new features, while continuing to share our users’ content.

Using this blended approach, we were able to provide a variety of useful information to our customers, from entry level users to advanced users. And, as the Revit Help Twitter account grew, so did the traffic to our new online help site, as it was retweeted and shared through other social media.

3. Experiment, analyze, adjust

As our followers increased in number, we knew we could increase our impact by tweeting at different times to entice users in different time zones and with different work schedules. We experimented by scheduling tweets at different times of the day and week, including weekends, to maximize visibility. We used flexible social media management software to handle the scheduling, and found that both Sprout Social and HootSuite were good choices. Our experiments paid off. We found the optimal tweet times for our community, earned a big increase in followers, and reached a new audience: university students who were learning Revit on the weekends.

In addition to automated scheduling, social media management software gave us access to a solid set of analytics tools. In addition to seeing aggregated click-through and retweet rates, we were able to see user demographics, including gender, age, and geographical location.

4. Listen and learn

We regularly followed our hashtags, commented, and contributed to our users’ conversations. We learned that social media doesn’t just facilitate communication, it requires it for success. Contributing to customers’ conversations gave us an opportunity to better understand their needs and to identify opportunities to meet some of those needs with new or enhanced learning content.

5. Have fun

As technical communicators, we’re driven to help customers, so what could be better than helping them in a fast, collaborative environment? They learn from us, we learn from them, and (maybe best of all) they learn from each other:

For LCD teams, engaging with customers on social media can be powerful and satisfying. This also satisfies the needs of Revit users to connect with Autodesk.

March 11, 2014

While designing software for professional domains like engineering, urban planning, and architecture, interaction designers and developers use tools like personas, workflows, and detailed use cases help the designer capture the building blocks of UX.

However, these tools might fall short when introducing new emerging behaviors, or framing the changing technological and social paradigms. To understand and design experiences around the changing and the emerging, there is a need for more nuanced and developed perspectives than just capturing what's existing out there.

Behavioral design offers a rich set of tools that designers can use to tackle with domain specific work habit challenges. Here, I will present 5 of these tools. In a follow-up post, I will detail a design for how we might use them to stage a persuasive intervention based on a collaboration workflow.

1. Motivation-Ability Matrix

Figure 1: B.J. Fogg’s behavior model

Conceptual matrixes are useful for designers while framing their problem as well as their solution space. B.J. Fogg provides a simple matrix for his behavioral model, and suggests two dimensions to a behavior change; motivation and ability (see Figure 1).

Behavior change happens when the individual with the right motivation and ability threshold is nudged by external triggers over a designated time. Someone might have the motivation but not the ability, or vice versa. Contemplating domain experts, a designer can easily find graspable hooks for both. The sweet spot between the two defines where the triggers can intervene.

2. Triggers

Figure 2: Hooked model, on triggers and rewards.

Nir Eyal developed an actionable framework on triggers called Hooked that follows a four step process, including trigger, action, variable reward, and investment (see Figure 2). He argues that to build a habit, designers need to introduce triggers, and reward the user in a dynamic manner (each time getting a variety of the former reward). Once the user begins investing in the product, she will come back and use the product more often.

Triggers might take different names, such as cues, signals, or nudges. These can be in the form of visual, haptic, and behavioral nudges. Mobile apps that push updates can be a good example of a trigger. Trigger design needs to be carefully crafted and shouldn’t overwhelm the user’s cognitive load. People are easily annoyed by triggers if they are too insistent, hard to bypass, and attention hungry. Trigger design should take subtleness and peripheral attention as its principles.

3. Routine-Ritual Maps

Figure 3: Ritual & Routine Maps

Contextual design emphasizes the importance of activities and situation in approaching habitual change. In a paper I have published, I’ve focused on situational dynamics, and mapped out individuals’ daily routines and rituals for habitual change. Routine maps provide the touch points of an existing habit and its potential potholes, whereas ritual maps unveil user emotions and value landscape. Ritual also shows the designer where a user prefers investing in their time, what their attention and awareness capital goes to. Using both, the designer can look for sweet spots where the user’s attention and awareness are more open to possible design interventions.

4. Rewards

The idea of rewards goes far to reinforce the experiments of B.F. Skinner. He discovered that people’s behaviors are changed based on external reinforcements. Gamification is a variant of behavioral design, defined by Gabe Zichermann as “the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems.”

Zichermann uses a rewards model involving status, access, power, and stuff (SAPS). He states that status is what people really appreciate as reward. Eyal suggests using variety since people can easily be unmotivated and lose interest with fixed conditioning. Michael Wu mentions the importance of the timing and schedule of rewards. For instance, he suggests a fixed-interval schedule as an effective method when activity needs to increase near deadlines.

5. Flow Principle

Figure 4: Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow model

Rewards, however, may not lead to behavior change unless the designed interventions are challenging enough for the target audience. This brings us to the flow principle, developed by Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal book Flow. Flow happens when an individual is so immersed in an activity that she forgets the passing of time and feelings.

This happens when the individual has a challenge that’s both complex and doable within her given skillset. This aligns with the motivation ability matrix mentioned earlier. Triggers should lead to challenges that can balance a sense of control and mastery as well as the curiosity to pursue their habitual change.

October 29, 2013

Ed de Guzman and I attended HCI International to present some of our UX work on visual design, and to see what we could learn from international scholars.

Our own presentation was a paper and poster on “Desirability Methods for Evaluating Visual Design”. In essence, we advocate the use of some innovative research techniques to understand how users make meaningful choices among visual design concepts. Fortunately, for our study we had access to a wealth of iconography, imagery, and logo design options from Autodesk’s brand redesign earlier this year.

Our study used three scaffolding techniques to assist end-users in articulating their preferences and perceptions of visual branding:

The Think Aloud method allows users to review visual design alternative layouts and accomplish a task. While doing so they are encouraged to think-aloud about what they are observing. This is the least structured technique.

The Visual Design Card Sort (de Guzman & Schiller, 2011) method is a modification of the Microsoft Product Reaction Card deck from their Desirability Toolkit. This technique allows users to choose three to five words that represent their interpretation of a visual design concept.

The Visual Design Mad Libs method involves showing visual design alternatives to users and asking them to complete a structured sentence such as “This logo is <company name>, it is a <describe logo> because <explain why the design is appropriate for the company>”. This is the most structured technique.

We conducted three studies, using one, two or three of these techniques to determine which were most effective. In summary, we found that more structured methods produced more specific, actionable results for the visual design team. If you are interested in seeing the full poster, let me know.

Elsewhere around the conference, Hiroshi Ishii, of MIT Media Lab, delivered an excellent keynote address on the topic of “Defy Gravity: The Art of Tangible Bits”. Referencing some fascinating tangible UIs such as Ping Pong Plus Plus and the I/O Brush, he eloquently described how devices are like faucets of information. Just as water evaporates in physical landscapes, information is reused and curated in digital places. Ishii challenges the HCI community to focus on radical atoms of “future dynamic materials that are computationally reconfigurable”.

Ishii’s dream of interactive tangible interfaces meshes beautifully with Autodesk’s vision of democratizing design and engineering to help people imagine, design, and create a better world. With the advent of 3D printable circuitry there will be many powerful ways to create these technologies using Autodesk tools.

Additionally, we attended sessions on

Design, ergonomics, and usability

Cross-cultural design

Human aspects of information security, privacy, and trust

A session from Chi-Hsien Hsu et al looked at translating the PAD emotional state model into Chinese, for a cross-cultural understanding of pleasure, affect, and desirability. Autodesk as a global company is interested in this, and it’s a personal interest of mine.

Other sessions covered perceptions of usability and brand attributes. For example, a paper by Tareq Ahram et al compared competitor products using 13 sensibility words. This gave us inspiration to learn more about how to compare Autodesk offerings, such as Autodesk 360, to their competitors. Similarly, Min-Xian Sun et al presented an interesting paper on similarity and dissimilarity pairs to study user perception.

Finally, we are very aware that users’ trust of cloud services, like Autodesk 360, rests soundly on strong privacy and high availability. These topics were addressed in several great sessions, like those led by Kathleen Hogan and John Bustard.

We continue to look to the academic community and practitioners of HCI to find the best practices to make Autodesk 360 compelling and engaging for design and engineering users. What are your thoughts on marrying user research and visual design? Have we done enough or too much? Leave us a comment below!

September 26, 2013

In my ten years as a UX designer, I have used many user interface prototyping tools, ranging from paper and pen, to Microsoft PowerPoint, real code and everything between. These days I tend to rely heavily on PowerPoint to aggregate mixed media such as scanned sketches, screenshots and output from other prototyping tools like Balsamiq. There has been an explosion of UI prototyping tools recently and I have tried many of them. I am fairly hard to please, however I recently came across a new player in this space that impressed me with its balance of simplicity, flexibility, usability, features, and price: Indigo Studio from Infragistics. Indigo Studio runs on Mac AND Windows and the file format is compatible between the two versions. In this video I highlight some of the basic features and show examples of a recent project I used it on. How much does it cost? Version 1 has been free until recently. Version 2, which was just released with the iOS pack and other features has gone up significantly: US$495/user/year. But if you buy before October 31, 2013 you can get it for $99 with the promo code INDIGO42Q.

July 10, 2012

One of my passions is exploring the possibilities of human-computer interaction. Perhaps it is my background in industrial design, but there is something particularly interesting to me in the ways that we try to bridge the gap between our bodies and our machines. We are naturally high bandwidth, multi-sensory creatures and we are trying to send and receive information from a machine that is functionally deaf, dumb and blind.

If some of the researchers have their way, the future is going to be full of much richer exchanges between ourselves and our machines. I recently attended the CHI 2012 conference where I saw some great examples such as the ZeroTouch interface. Multitouch on our phones or tablets is not so new anymore, but it is still a rare thing to see on large desktop sized displays. The Texas A&M Interface Ecology Lab showed an evolution to an old touch screen technology which may change this situation. Using a ring of infared emitters and detectors, the team has been able to create an optical sensing solution that does not suffer from occlusion and precision problems like other bezel-based touch solutions. The ZeroTouch is fast, accurate, works on a large scale and unlike many other multitouch devices, is relatively low cost. The ZeroTouch system was originally shown at CHI 2011, where the largest display they had it working on was a 27” monitor. At this year’s event they had improved the performance and had scaled it up to work on a 55” plasma TV.

The ZeroTouch was also interesting to me because of the fact that it was a frame, and not a screen or surface. This is significant for a few reasons. Firstly, despite the growing number of multitouch displays coming to market, it will be years before any significant number of people have access to this new technology. Secondly, some people work in places that spend a lot of money to have color accurate displays. These people are not going to want to throw away that investment just to have a richer interaction modality. If the ZeroTouch were to come out as an after-market enhancement to your existing screen – and if the price were right – it might just bridge that gap between the installed base of dumb displays and the next generation of touch-enabled displays. Finally, being a frame is interesting because it does not necessarily need to be mated to the surface of a display. It can hang out front and allow for open-air gestures like you might see with a Kinnect. While it cannot sense depth per-se, it does open the possibility of something going beyond what can be done with a surface sensor.

Hand and arm gestures are a great way of enriching our interaction with computers, but for some researchers it is our sense of taste that has been neglected for too long. Hiromi Nakamura was part of the team from Meiji University who showcased concept devices that introduced electric current into food as it is being eaten. At CHI 2012 they had a cup that had a wire in a straw which would electrify lemonade as it was drunk, and a fork that had a variable slider to adjust the electrification of food on the fork. Through modulation of the electric current passing through the food, different reactions from our taste buds can be elicited. In theory this could mean tastes like the amount of saltiness or sourness could be dynamically adjusted by changing the electrical waveform and intensity. In practice I found that the natural sourness of the lemonade overpowered my perception of any change to the drink. The cheese on the electrified fork on the other hand really did taste different. While holding the cheese on my tongue with the electric fork, I could taste distinct changes in the flavor as I slid the control from low to high. It was quite a remarkable experience to have flavors change in your mouth without adding or removing anything. Unfortunately, the alteration was making the cheese simply taste more or less metallic – not exactly an appealing flavor.

The practicalities and value of allowing a computer to interface with our sense of taste may be questionable, but adding sensors and actuators to enrich our experience is a good idea. Already our mobile devices communicate across our visual, auditory and tactile senses. Maybe someday we’ll have dental implants that make us taste candy when our sweetheart calls.

January 10, 2012

As architects become more knowledgeable about sustainable building design, they are becoming familiar with metrics such as Energy Use Intensity (EUI). EUI measures the energy a building consumes relative to its size and can be used to compare the energy use of different buildings. Users of our Conceptual Energy Analysis tools in Revit and Project Vasari are using EUI to compare simulation runs. Users often comment that an overwhelming number of results are returned by our analysis tools and they ask, "What do they all mean; why can't I just see this one EUI number really big?". They want a simplification of the complex data that we currently return which would highlight one particular piece of the data to make it easier to compare different designs.

I am an architect and user experience designer and have been working on the Conceptual Energy Analysis tools in Revit and Vasari for the past few years. Through this process, I, like many of our users, have learned a great deal about building science and energy use simulation and analysis. Interpreting analysis results is an exciting area for our field because there are many new user experience paradigms to explore. In addition to learning about building science, I have also wanted to learn more development skills so I could build and experiment more quickly with my own UI prototypes. I thought that building a simple app to display the EUI number really big might be a good beginner's development project. The new Autodesk My First Plug-In Training and a class I took on Expression Blendgave me the skills to get started.

As I worked on the project I learnedhow much I don't know about coding and why people get degrees in computer science! I was able to build a basic UI in Expression Blend, but the back end was still difficult for me. Luckily, we had really sharp interns over the summer who were able to help fill in the gaps to get my little app up and running. It was fun to be able to make tweaks to the UI myself and get results from simulation runs in this simplified UI.

Once the app was complete we handed it over to the energy analysis experts on our team to see if they might want to consider this prototype for use in our products. They brought to our attention some important points we had not considered. They felt that showing this one number in isolation, while seemingly simple and convenient, could lead users to incorrect conclusions. Just looking at EUI can be misleading. Actions like removing perimeter zoning from a building lowers the EUI, however this is actually harmful because it underestimates simulated energy use. EUI doesn't always paint the whole picture either: EUI can go down, but energy costs can actually go up if the mix of electricity (more expensive) and fuel (less expensive) changes. Our colleagues explained how important it is to understand the interplay of the results rather than just looking at a simple EUI number. We learned that while many users may want to see a simple number, they are better served by looking at a more comprehensive set of simulation returns.

While we ultimately decided not to include the app in this incarnation, in the future, I hope to build on the new prototyping and simulation analysis knowledge that this experience taught me. Then I’ll be able to redesign the app to include a wider set of simulation data that satisfies the user’s desire for better guidance from the data without sacrificing good building science.

December 06, 2011

Grab your popcorn, throw your dog a bone, adjust the lighting -- and otherwise prepare yourself for the briefest yet deepest of briefs on HTML5 and CSS3 and what it means to all of us in the WWW. In books one and two from A Book Apart, Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm put on a clinic about how HTML and CSS were dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. But before we go any farther, let us ascertain who you are and why are you reading this post, much less considering a deep-dive below the photic zone of markup and style?

I need to know if you really care WTF is the WHATWG? Do you lay awake at night replaying your carefully crafted argument for (or against) significant whitespace? Are you doing back-flips of joy because you may now wrap other elements inside a single a element?

So you’re moving from presentational to semantic markup but you haven’t found a way past the nuanced (and perhaps elitist?) comparison of b and strong, between i and em, and why big went obsolete while small survives. Before you even consider perusing the content of any web page do you nervously eye-track : ^ ? to your web developer toolbar to pre-verify that this hobo HTML has even validated???

May I ask what band was playing when you pulled off your first JavaScript rollover effect? When you dream, do your backgrounds scroll parallax in harmony with your dreamy electric sheep? Do you hanker for deep form styling? Waterboarding aside, are you gasping for subtly rounded corners?

If you answered yes, yes, yes to ANY of these questions, then the help you desperately need is at hand. So GET YOUR GEEK ON and read these books. Before I call your momma!

In HTML5 for Web Designers, Jeremy Keith begins with a wee tale on the fuss that led up to HTML5 (Chapters 1 & 2). He flies through the Rich Media markup of Canvas, Audio and Video in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is the whatup on Web Forms. Chapter 5 is nothing much…(unless your idea of game on is the semantic web that everyone keeps Yammering about). Finally, Mr. Keith lettuce-wraps it up with a down-to-earth review of things you can actually do today in HTML5 without smoking your browsers.

CSS3 for Web Designers is by Dan Cederholm. Now hold on, because this guy is really, really into space travel. And I’m guessing wine. And definitely design with a capital Dribbble. But without doubt Dan is best known for his uncanny command of stylesheets, the lingua franca of the presentation layer. He is pretty funny too, with handcrafted topics like “Navigating the Moon”, “Hover-crafting”, and ‘The Disappearing Gnome” sprinkled throughout his book like extra butterscotch on a jam donut. Sit up and take note CSS design intern and let it be learned that ingrained in this briefest of tomes Mr. Cederholm dispenses sage advice not just on how, but also on when one should...</spoileralert>.

The article centers on the Knowledge / Importance, or K/I Matrix, as a tool to,

get a clear vision of overall project status at any given point

know where to best allocate limited resources, and

be sure you - as a project team member - are working on what you should be at any point.

A K/I Matrix is a two-dimensional graph with Knowledge on the X axis and Importance on the Y axis, where,

Knowledge is how well a team understands a task, and

Importance is the relative value of an item to project success.

Project teams collaborate at regular intervals in the development cycle to position work items in the K/I Matrix. In this way the team collectively agrees on relative value, and understanding of each item. This allows for more informed decision making.

Over the last year the K/I Matrix has been successfully incorporated into a number of projects in Autodesk's AEC group. It's proving to be useful in quickly building team consensus around project priorities, and making teams more effective in the process.